查建英：国家公敌

[(Howard) Huaxin W. D. Wang]

发信人: xcvbnm (xx), 信区: RGForum
标  题: 查建英：国家公敌
发信站: 一见如故 (Thu Jul 19 19:16:27 2007), 本站(yjrg.net)

 

查建英：国家公敌

英文原文发表在《纽约客杂志》，链接：http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/...0423fa_fact_zha

 

北京市第二监狱位于这个城市的郊区，驱车过去，单调乏味的路上看不见任何标识。入口隐在离公路大约0.1英里的后方，我通常要不断提醒出租车司机留意左边的岔道，不然很容易错过。拐进岔道，第一眼看到的，是一扇暗灰色金属大门，沉重，镶白瓷砖的拱形边框。门内站着挎长枪的警卫。四周的高墙盘满了电网，最大限度的安全设施。在紧邻大门的等候室，我把钱包和手机放进带锁的保险箱，然后出示证件，等候传唤。多年探监下来，警官们都认识我了，但仍对我保持着职业性的疏远。我探视的是我哥哥查建国，一位民主志士，他以“颠覆国家罪”被判处九年有期徒刑。

 

建国于1999年夏天被捕，消息传来的那个时刻在我脑海中至今记忆犹新。当时我正站在加拿大蒙特利尔郊外一个朋友家的厨房，喝着现磨的咖啡，浏览那天当地报纸的头条，那是一则关于中国刚刚测试发射导弹的新闻，据说射程可达阿拉斯加。消息最后一段报道了建国的审判。我感到一阵惊讶和愤怒。与此同时，作为他的妹妹，我深感自豪：建国的所谓颠覆行为，是在中国协助组建了一个反对党，中国民主党（C.D.P）。在中华人民共和国历史上，第一次有人敢于组建和注册一个独立政党。这一切，建国和他的同道们是以完全公开、和平的方式去进行的。现在他们为此进了监狱。

 

七年前我刚去探访的那段经历相当艰难。每次我都必须申请特别许可。三十分钟的会面，两三个警卫一直在建国和我的两侧陪伴，包括一个专职监管“特别”囚犯的“特管处”官员。入狱前我们最后一次见面，是两年之前，建国身上的变化令我震惊。他剃了“犯人头”，穿着灰底白色斑马纹的粗棉囚衣，由于严重的沙眼和感染，他的两眼汪着水，手和脸都是浮肿的，指甲呈紫色，明显严重营养不良。我们面对面坐在一道厚厚的有机玻璃隔板的两边，通过电话听筒交谈──电话竟然是鲜亮的蛋黄色，就像儿童用的玩具电话。那些日子，我们的交流似乎紧迫而又意味深长。最初几次探视后，我会见了监狱长，他是一位年轻人，出人意外地彬彬有礼。（“你以为我们都是青面獠牙的恶魔吧？”他笑着对我说。）我跟他讨论了很多有关建国健康状况的话题。几个星期内，我的两个最主要的请求有了结果。建国乘坐一辆重兵押送的封闭厢车，离开监狱前往一家不错的市立医院，在那里接受了身体检查。随后，他被从那个关押着11个杀人犯的嘈杂牢房，转移到一间不那么拥挤、比习簿驳那羰摇?

 

四年前，我迁回北京，为中文杂志撰稿，并在一所学术机构工作。去北京市第二监狱探监，成为每个月的例行事务。我试着和坐在等候室“书桌”后的图书检查官谈天。亲属可以给被探视者带书，但必须经过检查官一一把关，所有“不适宜”的读物会被当场退回。任何可疑的政治读物都有可能被拒绝，但一本《哈维尔文集》却通过了：检查官盯着封面上这个神色阴沉的洋人头像看了半天，却不知道此人是谁。

 

“会见室”是一间毫无特征、整洁的大房间，几排固定在地面上的天蓝色椅子安置在有机玻璃隔板的两边。你可以看见外面精心修葺的花园，两个心型的花床。更远处，是一排灰色的水泥筒子楼，囚犯们在那里生活和工作。（他们每个星期放两次风，每次两个小时的户外活动。）你甚至看得见看守领着囚犯，一字排开，从那些楼远远地朝这间会见室走过来。

 

几年下来，我渐渐变成了众多探视亲属当中的普通一员。虽然电话仍被监听，但警卫早就对监视我和哥哥失去了兴趣。时间过得飞快。建国和我像两个不常见面的老朋友一样聊天。我一般先是询问他的健康和大致状况，再报告些亲朋好友的近况。然后，我们可能会谈起他最近阅读的书，或者讨论一下新闻热点，比如伊拉克战争、2008北京奥运会的筹备。有时我们甚至会小心谨慎的交流对中国政治现状的看法。最后，我会列一张购物单。监狱允许每个犯人每月拥有80块钱（大约10美元）的零花钱，前来探视的家属也可以在监狱小卖部购买150元的额外食品。这是出于安全考虑，同时也是监狱的一项收入。建国常要我买一盒蔬菜饼干。他在狱中学英语，一位以“台湾间谍罪”被判十年徒刑的囚犯常给他些指点。这台湾人的妻子离开了他，从没人来探视。此人特别爱吃这种饼干。

 

最初几年，我常会问建国他到底有没有挨过打或受过伤。“我和这里所有警官都处得很好，”他告诉我，“他们只是奉命行事。他们都知道我为什么进来的，从没有碰过我。我号子里的犯人全都互相打过架，除了和我。他们对我都挺尊重。”他还告诉我：点名时若喊他“犯人”，他从来拒绝答应，看守们也就算了。他反对这种称呼，是因为他根本不认为自己犯了什么罪。他也拒绝干所有囚犯都得参加的体力劳动，比如包装一次性筷子或者类似杂事。但看守们也就随他去了。

 

一位家族朋友告诉我，建国可以通过医疗假释离开中国。我征询了建国很多次。他不愿意。“我不会离开中国，除非我的进出自由得到保证，”他坚持。我不再问了。建国再三提起那些持不同政见者流亡海外的困境，在天安门事件后，他们失去了政治影响力。“一旦离开中国这块土壤，他们能起的作用就很有限，”建国说。但是，在窄小的牢房一坐就是九年，政治影响力又有多大──尤其是大多数国人根本不知道你的存在?

 

这话我终究没忍心说出来。中国大陆的媒体没有报道1999年C.D.P事件。很少有人知道发生了什么。在海外，也只是当时有一些媒体的报道和人权组织的抗议，但******事件一出来，这桩公案很快就被淹没了。蹲了将近八年大牢之后，建国依旧坚定无悔，但早已被世人遗忘。

 

2

 

我父亲的第一次婚姻留下两个儿子，建国是长子。他七岁那年，父亲离婚，娶了我的母亲。尽管建国随我父亲，但是我和他之间相差八岁，童年记忆中关于他的印象非常模糊。按当时流行的习俗，建国上了一所寄宿学校，只在周末回家。瘦高而沉默的他，一直徘徊在我们家庭生活的边缘。

 

当时离婚在中国并不常见，无疑给建国童年留下了阴影。我母亲还记得，有时候建国回家睡觉，她听见他躲在被子里抽泣。多年后，建国在狱中书信中形容那些周末像是“去别人家里做客”，感觉自己像寄人篱下的“林黛玉”。林黛玉是古典小说《红楼梦》里的悲剧女主角，从小父母双亡，寄居在舅舅家里，和自己的表姐妹们竞争爱情和关怀。但他母亲——我叫她钟阿姨——说建国从小就胸怀大志。钟阿姨第一次给他讲岳飞的故事，建国仰头看着她，含着眼泪说，“可我太小了，当不了岳飞！”她很震惊。“我没希望他当岳飞啊！”她告诉我。

 

也许钟阿姨希望建国成为一个学者。毕竟，这个男孩并非成长在军人家庭，他身边都是学者和艺术家。父亲是一个哲学家，钟阿姨从事歌剧研究，也是一名编剧。她出身于书香门第，父亲是大学副校长，母亲是画家，曾拜师齐白石。但建国在一封狱中来信里却形容小学生活“平淡无奇”。给他留下生动记忆的只有一件事：一个周日下午，他在走回学校的途中遭遇暴雨。他用热烈的语言回忆了一路上怎样和狂风暴雨搏斗，在天地茫茫空无一人的街道上，他全身湿透，却感受着滚滚雷声和金色闪电之壮美，以及最终到达学校大门时心头的狂喜：他战胜了漫天暴雨狂风，而且是独自一人！

 

建国不仅阅读量极大，并且是一名出色的围棋手。13岁的时候，他以第一名的成绩考入当时北京一所精英寄宿学校：人大附中。但他天性桀骜不驯。学校生活太多限制，他却不喜屈从琐屑的权力。在这个阶段，他开始崇拜毛泽东。他认真阅读了毛的传记，试图模仿伟大领袖：冬天冲冷水澡，读哲学，思考，和朋友们辩论政治和社会的大问题。他平生第一次政治行动是给学校领导写信，攻击死板的课程设置和小资情调的内容。建国至今为此自豪：在文革爆发之前，他就已经挑战体制，而且是单枪独马。

 

我的温馨童年也随着文革的暴风雨结束了。父母被打成“臭知识分子”和“反革命”，家里被抄得底朝天。我按照新政策就近入学，小学里大都是工人子弟，下学回家的路上常有同学冲我扔石头，甚至从楼顶上朝我家阳台上丢粪便。建国却在社会动荡中茁壮成长，成为学校里一派“红卫兵”的头儿。他很少回家，回来时则全副红卫兵时髦打扮：褪色绿军装和军帽，衣服口袋上别着毛像章，臂上戴着红袖章。他高大魁梧，面相英武，在我眼中宛如神话中的人物。见了他我有时羞涩得说不出话来。

 

两年以后，1968年，建国和一群红卫兵去了内蒙古。他是响应毛主席的号召，知识青年上山下乡改造中国农村。我父母为他饯行：记得那天家里挤满了红卫兵，高谈阔论，大笑，吃东西，我母亲煮了一锅又一锅的面条，父亲坐在书房里沉默地看着这些年轻人，好像坐在别人的房子里。17岁的建国显然是核心人物，举手投足就像一位战争前夜的年轻指挥官。他告诉朋友们：父亲的藏书里，看中什么就拿走什么。很多书就此被“借走”，包括我母亲青年时代最喜欢的书《包法利夫人》，此后再无影踪。

 

钟阿姨去火车站送他。火车启动，她朝儿子挥手。“但他表现得好像我根本不在那。他只是不停的喊：‘毛主席再见！’”她告诉我。“他中文革的毒太深了。”

 

那时候，成千上万的城市青年去了农村，但并非人人都有真信仰：有一些迫于压力，要表现自己的“革命热情”，另一些则因为城里无业可就。农村的贫穷和落后令人震惊，大部分知青都幻灭了。1970年代中期，文革热度减退，知青纷纷回城，当工人，或者到大学读书，不过当时读大学不是通过考试，而是看政治出身和政治表现。

 

建国不在其中。他在内蒙古农区干了七年，当了村长，很受农民欢迎。他干农活是一把好手，喝起白酒来抵得上当地人。他和一个北京同学结了婚，她为他留了下来，两人一起在农村过着自己的日子。村民们虽然对建国尝试的各种“革命实践”毫无兴趣，他诚实温暖、慷慨大度的个性却赢得了他们的友情和爱戴。

 

1976年，毛泽东去世，“文化大革命”结束了。建国的女儿出生。建国为她取名“继红”。接下来的几年对中国来说是转折关头：邓小平开始掌舵中国，使它转向改革开放。废弃十多年的高考恢复了，我是通过考试进入大学的人之一：当时我下乡不满一年，这个转变来得恰是时候。但建国似乎仍旧执着于以前的时代。他把一张巨大的毛主席像镶上黑纱，悬挂在家里墙上，他常常在像前独坐很久，陷入沉思。他妻子后来告诉我，大约有两年时间，建国都在悼念毛泽东。

 

建国最终接受了当地县政府的一个职务，为县委书记巴图工作。起初巴图很赏识这个北京小伙子的才干，可建国后来却批评起巴图来，认为他的一项政策损害了农民利益。在县里一次千人干部大会上，建国当面指责，让巴图下不了台。他很快被免职，在审查中被定为“四人帮走狗”。他被隔离关禁闭，只能看马克思、列宁、毛泽东的书。两年后，巴图升迁它地，建国才被放出来。他在地方上先后当过各种小干部，但从此再没受到提拔重用。

 

1985年，我在哥伦比亚大学念比较文学，暑假回国时去内蒙看他，坐了18个小时的硬座火车才到了一个尘土飞扬的小车站。在车站等我的那个人，看起来和其他赶着牛车卖瓜卖土豆的当地农民没什么两样。他穿着很土，一口当地口音，甚至养成了没事就蹲着的习惯。他的动作和眼神迟缓，一举一动都流露出久居一潭死水的穷乡僻壤的印记。

 

建国的妻子最终说服他回到北京的时候，已经是1989年初了。她是个实际的女人，不能接受一辈子在农村过穷日子的命运。是她在贫困的岁月里把建国最后一件红卫兵纪念品——一面褪了色、印有他们那个造反派标记的旗帜缝成了被面。现在她决心不让女儿变成农民，可对于建国来说，返回北京等于给他20年的精神历程划上了屈辱的句号。改造农村的革命理想成了虚妄的幻想。他没有改变农村，自己却被改变了。

 

建国回到北京没有几个月，天安门的学生游行就开始了。每天去广场听演讲和唱歌，看新一代学生造反派在行动，建国既震动又感动。二十年前，“红卫兵”的神是毛，而现在的理想青年们穿着牛仔裤和T恤，树立了一个新雕像：民主女神。

 

我那时住在北京，每天都去广场。我们碰到的时候，建国很少说话，不过看得出他内心思绪万千。一天下午，我去见一位广场上的活跃人物，约了他一起去。朋友对我笑脸相迎，请我进他们的帐篷，一群学生领袖正在里面开会。建国跟在我身后刚要进去，朋友却皱着眉头拦住了他：“不行，你不能进来!”我解释说，这人是我哥哥。朋友听了大吃一惊。北京生北京长的建国，如今看起来却像一个十足的乡巴佬。而1989年，领导民主运动的是城市精英。我朋友的势利态度明确告诉建国：靠边站吧，这可不是你的革命。

 

没过多久，那场革命不再属于任何人。天安门抗议者们在6月4日的遭遇，表明了公开挑战体制的人会是什么下场。屠杀之后，所有政府官员都被要求去看望几位住院士兵——“平息反革命暴乱的英雄”，以证明自己对党的忠诚。当时的文化部部长，小说家王蒙，称病住院躲过这一要求。他迅速下台了。

 

在那个春天，《人民日报》记者们曾在长安街上举起过一幅著名标语：‘我们不想再撒谎！’那个时刻弥足珍贵，它表达了群体的勇气。两个月后，他们被迫再次撒谎。一位《人民日报》记者向我描述六四后的清查运动是如何进行的：每个部门都要开会，每个人都必须参加，每个工作人员都必须说明自己在整个事件中每天都在做什么，然后对官方的结论表态。他回忆起十七年前那个场景：“每个人都照做了－－没有人敢说不。那种耻辱你能想象吗？我们所有人马上被彻底击垮了。”

 

在记者和知识分子中间，短暂的兴奋变成了压抑和恐惧。很多人退出公共舞台，转向私人生活。（有一些，比如我，去了美国或者欧洲。）很多学者转向冷僻的研究，于是在1990年代初出现了国学热。我的一位朋友，某杂志主编，曾经主持一个很有影响力的论坛，此后一段他把注意力转向古典音乐和饮食研究。

 

建国对共产党和毛残存的信仰在6月4日彻底崩溃。在政治上和个人生活上他进入了一个漂泊时期。

 

3

 

开黑车的司机是一个敦实的男人，长着一张饱经风霜、粗犷的脸，穿一件油乎乎的便宜外套。三年前那个下午，我走出监狱小卖部时，他正斜靠在一辆捷达车上抽烟。我是那天最后一个离开的探视者。他看到我，就猛吸了最后一口烟，甩掉烟头。

 

“幸好你还在这儿，”我进车之后对他说：“否则我就得走很远去坐公交车了。”

 

“我等着你呢。”他边发动车边简短地回答。

 

我告诉他我在城里的地址。他说：“三十块钱。”我说行，我们就上了路。在那条长长的沥青路尽头，车向右拐弯，开过大堆的建筑材料上了一条公路。从后视镜里看得到不远处一排高大的筒仓耸立在天空下。尽管离城不过40分钟的车路，这里到处都是旧工厂、瓦砾堆、工业垃圾、面临拆迁和“发展”的半荒芜的农庄。我十七岁去插队劳动的村子离此不过几里路。

 

和每次探视之后一样，我的情绪疲惫而孤僻。我合上双眼打起瞌睡来，直到一阵尖利的喇叭声把我惊醒。睁眼一看，四周都是汽车，我们已经下了高速公路陷进市区的车流中。车几乎是在蹭着走。大约是下午4点，堵车高峰期开始了。

 

“你探的是你哥哥吧？”司机忽然问。

 

我从后视镜里看着司机：“你怎么知道的？”

 

“噢，我跟二监的人很熟，我父亲以前在那儿工作。你哥是民主党的，对不对？”

 

“你知道他们？”

 

“知道，他们想搞多党制嘛。他判了几年？”

 

“9年，他已经坐了一半了。”

 

“有没有减刑？”

 

“没有，因为他不肯认罪。”

 

司机朝窗外啐了一口：“他们根本就没罪！但是坐牢管什么用？他有没有跟吾尔开西他们联络联络？”

 

我吃了一惊：吾尔开希是八九学运中一个很有煽动力的学生领袖，在美国流亡数年之后，现在住在台湾：“当然没有！他们怎么可能有联系？”

 

“那你肯定认识一些外国人吧？你应该叫你哥哥出国，和那些在美国和台湾的人聚聚。最重要的是得弄点枪！你怎么才能打得过共产党？只有武装斗争啊！”

 

“您这观点倒挺有意思，”我试图掩饰自己的惊讶。“不过那样一来中国肯定又要流血打内战、天下大乱。”

 

“那才好呢！”司机说。

 

我很震惊：“可真要打起仗来，最大的受害者还不是老百姓吗？”

 

“老百姓现在已经是最大的受害者了！”司机回答说，一脸愤怒。“你就看看北京吧――当官的和富人过的是什么日子，我们过的又是什么样的倒霉日子。”

 

在接下来的十几分钟里，我们堵在长安街上，司机跟我说了他自己的经历。他在一个工厂里干了20多年，开始当车工，后来当卡车司机。几年前，工厂破产倒闭，所有工人被解散，只得到了微薄的遣散金。

 

“他们总得给你一部分医疗保险吧，”我说。我想起我的三个高中女同学，这么多年来我们一直保持着联系。她们以前都是工人，都在40多岁的时候因为厂子倒闭被遣散，但后来他们全都找到了新工作，钱比以前挣得还多，其中两个甚至还买了房子。

 

“那保险屁都不值！”司机回答。“真生了病根本报销不了。我现在就怕得病，一病就完蛋了。给他们干了20多年，现在他们就这样把我们给打发了！”他又朝窗外啐了一口：“你看城里这些高楼，满街的餐馆，都是为有钱人准备的。像我们这样的人什么都买不起！”

 

在长安街的两旁，新的高楼大厦和巨型的广告牌屹立在晦暗的天空之下。要论建筑和设计，这个新北京的大部分外貌就像实现了某些地方官的现代梦。北京城里显然有很多钱，很多人生活得比以前好很多。但是贫富鸿沟也拉大了。我想，建国这种人也许正是这位牢骚满腹的司机这种人所期待的领袖吧。至少他们可以聚集在社会公正的旗帜下，发泄自己对中国现状的愤怒。

 

4

 

尽管六四屠杀唤醒了建国，那一年他却面临着更紧迫的事情：他得谋生！从法律上说，建国和他妻子都是没有身份的“黑人”：没户口，没房子，没工作。更糟糕的是也没什么技能。有一段时期，他们投靠亲戚，在建国的弟弟建一开办的一所成人教育学校里做临时工。建国看大门，他妻子当会计。学校办得挺成功，主要是做英语考试的补习课程。六四事件之后，学英语变得更热门，TOFEL成了申请外国学校的关键所在。建一很快富了起来。这个角色反转实在令人尴尬。两兄弟个性完全不同：在秉性严肃、胸怀大志、刻苦耐劳的建国身边，建一从来像个长了一张漂亮脸蛋的“小混混”：逃学、泡妞、有钱就花在下馆子和享乐上。但在九十年代的乱世里，游戏规则迅速变化，这位“花花公子”却如鱼得水。一开始，他想让建国帮他共同经营学校，但建国拒绝了：他宁可把时间花在阅读和思考上，看大门的好处就是有的是时间。“他老想救中国，可他连自己都救不了！”建一曾这样跟我议论建国。我真不知道建国给这么个弟弟打工干活内心到底是什么感受。

 

这份工作建国没做多久。在接下来的十年中，建国频繁搬家，从一处房到另一处，从一份工作到另一份工作，大多是办公室和公司杂役。他似乎觉得自己的阅读和思考已经相当充足了，该试着干点大事了。1992年后，社会上刮起一股下海热潮，建国也开始折腾起一联串的生意。他倒卖过煤，办过炼油厂，还生产过一种新型稠酒饮料（我尝过，那味道实在不敢恭维，喝起来就像止咳糖浆），做过商业培训。但无一例外，他总以关门大吉或者辞职不干收尾。到1997年夏天，他被捕前我最后一次见到他时，他已经有过好几回破产记录了。他的个人生活也很混乱，和共同生活了二十年的妻子离了婚，又和稠酒厂里一个年轻漂亮的内蒙女孩再婚。这第二次婚姻维持了不到一年，就和他的生意一起垮掉了。最后建国结束了动荡的生活，和他女儿继红住在了一起。

 

那时，继红早已改名为慧怡。这女孩上了一所普通的大学学习酒店管理，把时间都花在看通俗小说、和女友聊天上面，但她却是个极有孝心的女儿。1998年她毕业后，在高档的京伦饭店找到一份前台的工作，马上把每月工资的一半交给父亲花。建国实在不是经商的料，这一点父女两人心里都明白。那年，建一病死于恶性脑瘤，把他在北京的房子留给了建国。建国总算有了一块可以称为自己家的地方。有了家，加上女儿的经济援助，他终于可以自由地做自己想做的事了。

 

那年8月，我收到建国一封长信，笔调怅惘，充满忧思和怀想。建一死时年仅44岁，对建国显然是个震惊和打击。“他走了，我也更紧迫地感到人生的苦短，”建国写道。“昨天是我47岁生日，我剩下的20-30年也会一晃而过？”他开始回首自己的往昔：

 

“我一生心强命不强。几十年来，我一直与命运搏斗，咬紧牙，不流泪。我是一个理想主义者。为民主理想，退党；为自由理想，辞职，再辞职；为爱情理想，离婚，再离婚。至今是一个在思想上、事业上、经济上、感情上的‘漂流者’……现在中国市场低迷、萧杀，企业多数不景气，中国也在风雨漂泊中，不知走向何方，吾辈何时才有揭竿而起的机会？”

 

我记得当读信时心底涌上隐隐不祥之感：建国一点没变啊。在一个四处出击、四处碰壁的生意人的内心，埋伏着一个造反者，他在等待着新的宏伟大业和又一轮时机的到来。

 

我并不知道，建国那时已经找到了他决心为之献身的宏伟大业。几年前，他遇到了一个叫徐文立的人，徐当年是铁路上的电工，也是“西单民主墙”时期的民运老将。那是上世纪七十年代末短暂的解冻期，当时，在北京市区中心的西单路口，人们用大字报的形式在墙上张贴了各种油印的政论、海报、散文、诗，这些大字报吸引了无数人的目光和讨论，直到1979年末当局出来整肃和清除了西单民主墙。当朋友把徐文立介绍给建国时，徐刚在监狱里关了十二年被放出来。两人激情澎湃地谈论中国政治，但一开始他们也策划着一起做点生意。其中一个想法是开家租车公司。他们做了一些市场调查，还自封了两个人在公司里的头衔：徐将任董事会的主席，建国任副主席。但这个策划后来也没有了下文：徐指望的投资最终没能到位。

 

1998年初，中国的环境异乎寻常地宽松——政府正谈判加入WTO；克林顿总统来访。于是各省各地持不同政见者的小群体们跃跃欲试，乘机筹划成立一个反对党，名字就定下来叫中国民主党（C.D.P）。徐担任了民主党北京支部的主席，建国担任副主席：当初经商没能用上的头衔，这回两人把它用到了更崇高的事业上。不知是因为无比的英勇还是出于天真，民主党人们决定公开地做一切事情：他们前去民政局为C.D.P.申请注册，在网络上发表声明和文章，和外国记者交流。开头几个月政府容忍了这些行为，但克林顿走后没多久，6月，形势急转直下，第一波逮捕和审判开始了。徐文立被判13年。建国虽未被抓，但每天有4个安全局的人跟着他。他接任民主党执行主席，并且坚持活动：他召开会议力劝剩下不多的C.D.P党员们稳住阵脚；他在网上发表声明，陈述他的政治观点并要求释放徐文立和其他被捕同仁。1999年6月，当警察最终逮捕建国时，他早已一切准备就绪。那一阵他甚至随身带着一支牙刷。

 

5

 

“在日常生活里，英雄行为会显得不合时宜，”捷克异见人士LudvíkVaculík在1970年代写过，“英雄主义只是在特殊情境下才被接受，但它不会持久。”天安门事件之后的中国印证了这些话。随着时间的流逝，社会仿佛恢复了正常。整个1990年代，新的市场改革启动了，人们的精力全都投向聚敛财富，党为了掌控公共话题设立了一套明确的导向（比如著名的“三T禁区”:天安门、台湾、西藏）。随着经济的迅速发展，知识精英群体分化了：一些下海经商，另一些――尤其是经济学者和应用科学方面的专家――以出售专业技能为政府或企业效劳。艺术家和学者们也纷纷努力适应市场。

 

渐渐地，一种不言而喻的共识产生了，正如上个世纪90年代后期一本书的标题所言：《告别革命》。这本书是由两位80年代的明星学者所著，一位是哲学家、历史学家李泽厚，一位是文学批评家刘再复。这两位都是八十年代思潮中影响极大的人物，而那些思潮最终导致了八九学运。

 

这两人都卷入了天安门事件，结果九十年代两人都居住在美国。然而他们的新书却对激进分子和革命者进行了严厉的批判。回望上个世纪的中国历史，李刘二位观察到，激进的改革试验最终总是导致灾难或专制。中国太大了，它的问题太多太复杂，不能速战速决。渐进地改良，而不是激进地革命，才是正确的途径。在另一篇文章里，李甚至列举了四个发展阶段――经济增长，个人自由，社会公正，政治民主――中国走向全面现代化不可能逾越这几个阶段。换句话说，真正的民主不可能一蹴而就。

 

这是两位聪明、理性并同情自由民主的中国人的观点，这种观点在很多聪明、理性的中国人当中有着广泛的共鸣，他们认同自由主义，却越来越不赞同激进改革的态度。尽管这本书是在香港出版，但是它折射出内地精英的态度在90年代发生了微妙的变化。

 

新的共识是由许多潮流合力促成。在海外，严重的派系纷争侵扰了流亡民运组织，使之濒于瓦解。而在中国，公众生活的基调是邓小平的“不争论”――就是说，先忘掉意识形态论争、集中精力发展经济。一方面，技术官僚进入政治局掌权，推进市场改革，同时，意识形态宣传家们留守中宣部，压制着批评之声。

 

这期间，经济持续高速地发展，中国与国际市场接轨使得4亿中国人脱离了贫穷，一个新兴的富裕阶层开始出现在城市和沿海地区，这些地方的年轻人成长于流行文化与消费主义潮流，远离政治。作为经济繁荣的受益者，他们都是“挺中派”，民族主义在滋长。至于“民主”，倒真不知道这些年轻人会对这种问题有多少关注。

 

所以，当建国及其同道在1998年成立中国民主党的时候，他们不仅没有看清政府的容忍底线，也没有准确地估测到国人的心理。最主要的是，他们缺乏深厚的社群根基，既没有受过良好教育也未与精英阶层进行沟通，连与其他的自由主义者和改革者也极少联系。一些人，比如徐文立，有坐牢前科又坚持不服、拒绝妥协，结果被边缘化。他们具有勇气和信念，除此之外却乏善可陈。一些人，例如建国，曾去经商创业，试图做些“建设性”的事情，但一无所获。简而言之，他们是一批在新时代迷失的人。

 

起初去探监的时候，尽管建国不说，但我看得出他很在意外界对于他的所作所为、以及他的遭遇的反应，所以我努力传达给他一些我所能寻觅到的“正面消息”。他的眼睛会随之一亮，或者神色庄重。但随着CDP越来越少见于新闻媒体，我的任务也变得越来越艰难。2002年底，徐文立这位明星异见人士在圣诞前夕以保外就医被释放并立即飞到美国。这之后,有关其它C.D.P坐牢成员的报道几近消失。

 

有一次，在等候探视的时候我与另外一个家属聊了一会天，她是来看她弟弟的，他因为杀人被判了20年刑。“他开了一个餐馆，别人欠他的钱，”她解释说，“他太年轻、太冲动。”她问我：你哥哥做了什么，当我告诉她原委之后，她惊讶极了：“组党？”她盯着我上下打量仿佛我讲的是一个外星故事：“咱们国家还有政治犯啊，我一点不知道！我以为都是为钱关进来的呢。”最后一次我在主流媒体看见CDP被提及是在2002年三月，那是《纽约时报》周末杂志的封面头条。这篇文章写的是我的朋友约翰·卡姆，他曾经是一个美国商人，后来变成了一个全职为中国政治犯呼吁的活动家。此文以非常轻蔑的口气提到CDP，称它为“由几百个没有牙齿毫无打击力的成员结成的一个组织，所写的文章只是彼此读读而已”。

 

读到这段话，我的心都疼得抽紧了。被称作极权国家“颠覆者”，CDP成员们可以为此自豪。他们也可以原谅没有跟随他们站出来的同胞：他们之所以是英雄，正因为他们具备大多数人所没有的英雄气概。但对这讥讽他们无用而可笑的判决，他们会作何感想？这判决竟来自《纽约时报杂志》---民主自由的象征之一，而他们正是为民主自由的理想牺牲了一切！一群无牙无力的人写文章给彼此看：这话够残酷的，同时也说出了真相。事实上，他们之所以无牙无力是因为他们的对手太强大，他们的言论没有传播开去是因为这种言论在中国不被允许传播---但也许这些都无所谓。我真想大哭一场，但我不知道是为建国感到难过还是生他的气――他怎么这样傻。他坐在他那间狭小的牢房里，日复一日，年复一年，而世界早已风云变幻弃他而去。

 

6

 

“你不能说世界已经遗忘了他，”约翰·卡姆坚持对我说：“我就没有！我一直在关注你哥哥的事。”说这话时，我们正在北京一家酒店大堂里喝咖啡，约翰来访中国时在此下榻。

 

约翰·卡姆的中文名字叫康原。用他自己的话来说，他是一个“人权推销员”。他曾任香港美国商会主席，是个收入优厚的商人，有专职司机替他开奔驰，有女仆和位于高尚住宅区的私宅。但在1990年代中期，他放弃一切，投身为中国政治犯呼吁的活动。他长年频繁往返于北京和华盛顿之间，频频会见两国高官权要，利用自己所有资源---无可争议的数据、广泛的个人关系网、连哄带劝的游说、名人效应、讨价还价---来确保中国政治犯这个话题不会被人淡忘。

 

约翰是个声音洪亮的大个子，有着平易近人的幽默感和天生的社交魅力。他也是个虔诚的天主教徒，有传教士般的使命感，言谈充满圣经警句般美妙的韵律。比如他会说：正义之河，急流直下，道义之川，强不可阻（意译）。对我关于探视建国过程中出现的种种问题，约翰提出过很多意见和指导。如果说建国得到了比其他一些政治犯更好的待遇，这大概要感谢约翰的关注努力。但是，约翰也承认，在由各个西方政府及民间组织合力编辑的政治犯年度列表上，建国的名字已经消失了。我曾问约翰，假设他身处建国的处境，他会怎么做。约翰沉思片刻，给我讲了一个20世纪四十年代末麦卡锡时期，发生在德国剧作家贝尔托·布莱希特（BertoltBrecht）身上的故事。布莱希特当时住在美国，被美国众议院的“反美活动调查委员会”传讯。布莱希特出庭作证，澄清他毫不同情共产主义，委员会为此感谢了他的“合作”。随后，布莱希特立即飞往欧洲，最后抵达东柏林，对他刚在美国传讯席上的反共证词毫不惭愧。“如果我被捕了，我会像布莱希特那样做的”，约翰对我说：“我会撒谎来保住我的小命。然后我还可以拥有我的生活！”

 

我叹息了。在我心中，约翰为营救那些他素未谋面的异国人士而放弃自己的优越生活，实在是一个美国式的英雄。如果像他这样的人也会做一些不得不做的事来不至于陷身囹圄，为什么我哥哥却一定要如此固执？一点一点的剥去那堵墙，难道不比用你的头去撞它要更有实际意义么？

 

我所听到过的对建国最严苛的评论却来自于他的生母。“这不是勇敢，”钟阿姨曾这么对我说，“这是狂妄和愚蠢。他从小就有英雄情结。问题是他并不是英雄。他是一个想当将军的士兵，可以冲锋陷阵，但没有将军的才智。”钟阿姨年轻时是一个美丽的女人。1957年，她被打成右派，失去职务，在牛棚里劳改多年。现在的钟阿姨已经是一个鬓发斑白、70多岁的小老太太了，她笑容和善，但是腿脚时常浮肿发痛。尽管对共产党已不存幻想，她还是认为变化只能慢慢发生。在钟阿姨眼里，CDP的所作所为无异于鸡蛋碰石头。她曾经试图说服建国不要卷入CDP，提醒他对于自己家庭的责任。建国却用一句经典回应：“忠孝不能两全。”钟阿姨对建国的执拗彻底死心，在他被捕之后的头两年里都没有去探望过他。

 

建国对他母亲也同样不满。一次，钟阿姨和我一道去探视，两人轮换着和建国通过电话交谈。钟阿姨说到中国太大了，不能变得太快，现在情况逐渐改善，很多事情都在变好。我看到建国的脸色越来越阴沉，他终于开口说了几句话，钟阿姨便匆匆将电话递给了我。我一拿起听筒建国就语气激动地说：“我不想听她说话！越听越生气！”

 

那次探视之后，我给钟阿姨讲了韩东方以前跟我的一次谈话。韩东方是一个工会活动家，在八九事件后被关押。我们碰面的时候，韩已经定居香港多年，主持一个关于中国劳工问题的电台热线节目。作为异议人士，韩的声誉无懈可击。他在狱中两年受尽折磨，染上重病差点死掉。但他不曾屈服，毅然绝食抗议。韩一点不像我见过的其他中国异见人士，他衣着时尚，举止得体，一口流利的英语，并且对自己的过去和弱点颇有反思。韩对中国异议人士群体有不少批评，包括他自己在内。“咱们还是别谈这个话题吧”，韩对我说，“对这个群体我没什么好话可说。”韩认为很多中国异议人士太自我膨胀、自我中心，“这是一种病，但我们中的许多人意识不到这一点。”不过，韩又说，最好不要对正在坐牢的异议人士讨论这个问题。“为了熬过监狱生活，你必须调动全力，不断自我激励，确信你自己就是一个英雄。你需要这种心理上的自大甚至傲慢来支撑你的精神。你此时绝对无法承受自我怀疑。”

 

钟阿姨表示接受韩东方的这些意见，她答应不再和建国讨论政治。“我只是希望他能顺利服满刑期，健康出狱。”钟阿姨边说边摇头：“出来以后，也许咱们能和他好好的谈一谈。我希望他能改变他的思维方式，不要再进去了。”

 

7自从民主党被镇压之后，中国的政治版图变得更复杂了。经历了多年的快速发展之后，中国现在已经是世界第四大经济体了，并且正在逼近德国和日本，甚至被普遍预测将会在2050年赶上美国。中国同时还拥有世界上最大的外汇储备。但是，伴随这种转变的还有中国各地的腐败，环境恶化，贫富差距拉大，和瓦解的社会福利。胡温政府在相当程度上缓和了这些问题，出台政策削减农业税，关注社会弱势群体，采取措施惩戒以权谋私。但是，人们普遍意识到，政府需要有更深层次的改变和适应。一方面是饱受社会不公、人数有增无减的弱势群体，这些人要求改革和公平；另一方面则是庞大的中层官僚，他们从与商界结成的利益同盟中获利甚丰，因此抵制深层的体制变革。但大家心里都明白，政治领域的博弈和改革早晚要发生。

 

最近四五年里，政治改革的呼声日益增大，但是呼吁和努力的方式却变得婉转多样，几乎像一门艺术。法制和维权，已经取代了人权这个敏感用语。消费者权益，民工权益，私有财产权，成了人们谈论的焦点。每年都有许多媒体新闻记者报道腐败案例，律师为民权案件出庭，学者研究触动历史空白点（诸如中日战争，60年代初的三年大饥荒，文革等等），出版商打破禁忌，刊印敏感书籍。时不时会听见又一个请愿，但在这些请愿书上签名的往往是一组个人，大家都谨慎地避免成立组织。这类行动往往是自发的和零散的，但随着网络的普及，新闻传播更快了，控制信息变得越发困难。在中国互联网上，批评者的声音四面八方此起彼伏，检察官们似乎在和千千万万的小股游击队作战。一个犯忌者被抓住了，却有更多的犯忌者成了漏网之鱼。这些批评者已经不再像CDP那样容易被抓住、隔离而消灭了。

 

与此同时，全球化的浪潮使得政府和领导更注意自己的形象了。最近几年，官方说法中的“和平崛起”和“构建和谐社会”正反映了一种在国内国际政治中更柔和的身段和态度。总体而言，中国的政治气氛变得宽松了，人民也变得不再那么害怕了。无论是私底下还是台面上，中国人谈论政治改革的声音正变得越来越响了。

 

所以钟阿姨对建国说的话是有道理的：中国的现状的确正在不断改进。而且，也并不是所有人都已经忘记了CDP事件。有几位自由派的中国朋友就对我说，正因为有象建国这样的人敢于“以身试法”触犯底线，其他人才会明白究竟他们能够在底线之上推进多少。正如其中一位崔卫平所说的：“正因为有了他们，官方才认为我们是温和的。由于他们，我们才不至于坐牢。仅仅因为这一点，我们就该心存感激。”崔是一个文学和电影评论家，她将哈维尔的作品翻译成中文，还公开发表文章倡议建立公民社会以抗衡极权文化。崔十分尊敬建国这样的人，但她也说：“真正的变化是在许多微小、被人忽视的地方发生的。创造历史的不是孤胆英雄和精英，而是社会运动。”

 

另一位著名的自由主义人物、中国社科院哲学所的徐友渔，是政治改革的强力呼吁支持者，但他也曾对我说，他绝对不会做出CDP创办者们那种“傻瓜决定”。他说：“从政治策略的角度看，那是很愚蠢的。”徐对西方分析哲学和自由主义理论很有研究，强调行动之前“理性分析”的重要性。“也许他们急于创造纪录，想成为在共产党中国公开成立第一个反对党的人。如果这是他们的动机，这种人性弱点属于我可以理解和谅解的那一种。”和建国一样，徐当年也曾是红卫兵，他写的文革回忆录坦诚感人，深刻反思了自己青年时代的种种幻象。徐将回忆录题赠建国，托我探监时带去。不出所料，此书没能通过监狱书籍审查官那一关。

 

如果说徐友渔是教育者，建国则是实干家。CDP的所有成员都是实干家，但历史对他们并不慈悲。记得某位中国企业家说过：“走在众人前面一步的人是领袖，走在众人前面三步的人是烈士。”CDP的成员正是这样的烈士。我用“不以成败论英雄”的中国老话来自我安慰。但建国有时确实象骡子般固执简单，对政治的看法非黑即白，漠视灰色地带，更别说中国今天的现状是如彩虹般多姿多彩难以名状。在情绪不好的时候，我会想起孔子对他的学生子路的评语：由也好勇过我，无所取材。

 

现在，我觉得这两种态度都不大对头。我曾与林培瑞（PerryLink）谈起过魏京生。林培瑞执教于普林斯顿大学，是一位出色的汉学家，而魏则是建国心目中的英雄，也是中国民运中一个传奇人物。1978年，魏只是一个28岁的电工，却居然有胆量在民主墙上贴大字报要求民主，直斥邓为独裁者。更为荒谬的是，魏因此被捕，罪名却居然是“泄露国家机密”，换来15年的刑期。漫长的监狱生活和疾病都不曾动摇魏的信念，刚获释放，魏立刻重新投入民运，不久再度入狱，被判十四年。两年后他以“保外就医”的名义被飞到美国，在那里继续与中国政府抗争。魏警告西方，不要被中国改革所迷惑，因为共产党永远不会改变其真正本质。但其实永远不会改变的是魏京生。随着时光流逝，许多魏当年的崇拜者都认识到魏对中国的看法是一成不变和简单化的。事实上，共产党远比魏京生身段灵活，更加能够与时俱进。

 

我把自己对哥哥和魏的矛盾想法告诉了林培瑞：我敬佩他们的勇气和深切的正义感，但很难赞同他们对自己观点那种近乎宗教式的确信。林培瑞说：“魏京生这种人就像北极，他们已经冰冻了，但他们代表着一极。”

 

我想：是啊，哥哥已经冰冻了，他的世界观不会改变也不可能改变了。他将一堆巨大复杂犬牙交错的问题简化为一个万恶之源：共产党。结束一党专制，罪恶就会被根除。他被关进监狱，而他也把世界关在门外，充耳不闻那些可能动摇自己信念的声音，闭眼不看那个自相矛盾、模糊不定、却充满种种可能性的真实世界。但也正因如此，林培瑞说得对：象建国这样的人代表着一极。当然，那些将他关进监狱的人，是站在了历史错误的一边。我有一位在北京开律师事务所的大律师朋友叫刘歌，就爱这么提醒我：“历史上所有现代化成功的国家，都是多党制的国家，所有顽固坚持一党制的国家，最终都将失败。结论很明显：民主使一个国家强大，独裁只会使一个国家失败。今天中国的统治者们想让中国变得更好，而且他们也的确干得不错。问题是他们至今无法面对自己丑陋的过去，无法承认正是他们从大跃进到文革，把中国搞得这样百孔千疮。他们到现在还没有足够的自信，所以接受不了象你哥哥这样激进的批评者。”

 

不过，我渐渐不愿只从中国政治这个角度来评价建国。我不愿把哥哥看作政治棋盘上的一个小筹码，而宁愿把他看作一个身有瑕疵但令人钦佩的人。哥哥身上有一种品质的确不同凡响：为了理想他可以拒绝妥协，并且不惜一切代价。一位美国作家朋友劳瑞.西格尔（LoreSegal），曾听我反复说起建国的事，于是有一天她就用2005年那部“企鹅的远征”的纪录片来打比喻。“企鹅是一种笨拙可笑的动物：肥胖，一根筋，步履蹒跚，常常一跤跌得嘴啃泥。但是，只要一到水里，他们的泳姿多么优雅美丽！你哥哥政治上的想法和作为很荒唐，但他的理想主义和他的勇气，因为如此纯洁而如此淳美。”

 

建国究竟是一个傻子还是一个英雄，也许这问题无关紧要。他行动的道德涵义早已远远超越了他行动的效果。通过坚守承诺，他已经求仁得仁，此生无憾。有一次探监时我对建国提起他的一位中学同学温铁军，如今是三农问题专家，最近还获得官方的特殊嘉奖。建国回应道：“那很好啊。他是体制内改革派，我是体制外的。有很多大知识分子可以用他们的知识推动改革。我没有受过足够的系统教育，但我们这样的人，也可以起作用。”说到这，建国向我微笑：“性格决定命运。你要记住：你哥哥是一个简单、老式、过时、固执的人。一旦我下定决心，我会坚定不移。”这几年来，他掉了许多头发，最近一次带状疱疹的发作在他前额上留下几块疤，但他的神色却比以往越发安详宁静。离刑满只有一年多了，建国开始谈论还有多少书他想在出狱前看完。“真的，这里其实不错，”他竭力让我放心，“我会在2008年出去，如果那时你在北京，我们可以一起看奥运会。”我们谈起了几个在上海的表兄弟，都是一些成功的商人和律师。“我很高兴他们能这样成功，”建国由衷地说，“但是，人各有志。一个国家要想实现民主，总得有一些人甘愿为此流血牺牲。看看人家南韩，还有台湾，多少次的镇压，抓过多少政治犯。但是，一波接着一波总有人站起来，前仆后继，他们是用生命铺平了那条通往民主的路。”

 

在那一刻，建国目光坚定、姿态豪迈，似乎忘记了自己身在牢中。“中国这么大一个国家，有13亿人口，我们总该有几个人愿意去做这件事吧。”

 

[此文英文稿原载美国《纽约客》杂志2007年4月号]
http://www.sinomontreal.ca/bbs/printthread.php?t=454419

 

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Enemy of the State: The complicated life of an idealist.
by Jianying Zha

 

April 23, 2007

 

 

 

Jianguo (age thirteen), with Jianying (age five), a younger brother, Jianming, and their mother.

 

 

 

 

 

Brothers Beijing Second Prison is on the outskirts of the city for which it is named, and you can drive past the drab compound without ever noticing it. It’s set about a tenth of a mile off the highway, and when I visit I usually have to tell the cabdriver about the exit on the left, because it’s easy to miss. The first thing you see, after the turnoff, is a heavy, dun-colored metal gate framed by a white tiled arch, and then the guards standing in front with long-barrelled automatic weapons. Electrified wires are stretched taut along the top of the outer wall; it’s a maximum-security facility. Inside the waiting room, adjoining the gate, I stow my purse and cell phone in a locker, present my documents, and wait to be called. The guards recognize me but maintain a professional remoteness. I’m visiting my brother, Zha Jianguo, a democracy activist serving a nine-year sentence for “subverting the state.”

 

Jianguo was arrested and tried in the summer of 1999, and I remember with perfect clarity the moment I learned what had happened. I was standing in the kitchen of a friend’s country house, outside Montreal, drinking a cup of freshly made coffee, and glancing at a story on the front page of the local newspaper. It was about a missile that China had just test-launched, which was supposed to be able to hit Alaska; in the last paragraph, Jianguo’s trial was reported. I was astonished and outraged, and, as his little sister, I was fiercely proud as well: Jianguo’s act of subversion was to have helped start an opposition party, the China Democracy Party (C.D.P.). It was the first time in the history of the People’s Republic of China that anyone had dared to form and register an independent party. Jianguo and his fellow-activists had done so openly, peacefully. Now they were going to prison for it.

 

My first visits, seven years ago, were particularly arduous. I had to obtain special permits each time, and during our thirty-minute meetings Jianguo and I were flanked by two or three guards, including an officer in charge of “special” prisoners. I was shocked by how changed Jianguo was from when I’d last seen him, two years earlier. It wasn’t just his prisoner’s crewcut and uniform of coarse cotton, vertical white stripes on gray; his eyes were rheumy and infected, his hands and face were swollen, and his fingernails were purple, evidently from poor circulation and nutrition. We sat on opposite sides of a thick Plexiglas panel and spoke through handsets—they were an incongruous Day-Glo yellow, like a toy phone you’d give a child. Our exchanges, in those days, seemed fraught with urgency and significance. After the first few visits, I also met with the warden, who turned out to be a surprisingly cordial young man. (“You expected a green-faced, long-toothed monster, didn’t you?” he said to me, smiling.) We discussed various issues regarding Jianguo’s health. Within weeks, he granted my two main requests. Jianguo was taken out of the prison in a van with armed guards to a good city hospital, where he received a medical checkup, and he was moved from a noisy cell with eleven murderers to a less crowded, quieter cell.

 

Four years ago, I moved back to Beijing, where I write for Chinese magazines and work for an academic institute; the monthly trip to Beijing Second Prison has become a routine. I try to make conversation with the officer at the “book desk,” where you can leave reading material for the prisoner you’re visiting; he excludes whatever he deems “inappropriate.” Anything political is likely to be rejected, although a collection of essays by Václav Havel got through: the officer peered at the head shot of the gloomy foreigner, but didn’t know who he was.

 

The so-called “interview room” is a bland, tidy space, with rows of sky-blue plastic chairs along the Plexiglas divider; you can see a well-tended garden outside, with two heart-shaped flower beds. Farther away, there’s a row of buildings, gray concrete boxes, where the inmates live and work. (They’re allowed outdoors twice a week, for two-hour periods of open-air exercise.) You can even see the unit captain lead the prisoners, in single file, from those buildings to the interview room.

 

These days, I’m just another visiting relative, and, though the phones are monitored, the guards have long ago lost interest in watching my brother and me. Time passes quickly. Jianguo and I often chat like two old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while. I start by inquiring after his health and general condition, then report some news about relatives or friends. After that, we might talk about the books he’s read recently or discuss something in the news, such as the war in Iraq or Beijing’s preparation for the 2008 Olympics. Sometimes we even exchange carefully phrased opinions on China’s political situation. Finally, I make a shopping list. Each month, a prisoner is allowed about eighty yuan in spending money (about ten dollars) and a hundred and fifty yuan of extra food if a visiting relative buys it at the prison shop; this is for security reasons, but it also provides a source of income for the prison. Jianguo often asks me to buy a box of cookies. Another prisoner, who is serving a ten-year sentence for being a “Taiwanese spy,” has been teaching him English. The man’s wife left him, and no one comes to visit. Apparently, he really likes the cookies.

 

In the first couple of years, I kept asking Jianguo whether he was ever beaten or hurt in any way. “I’m on pretty good terms with all the officers,” he would tell me. “They are just following orders, but they all know why I got here, and they’ve never touched me. My cellmates have fights among themselves but never with me. They all kind of respect me.” He told me that the jailers let it drop when he refused to answer if he was addressed as fan ren (or “convict”) So-and-So; he objects to the title because he doesn’t believe that he committed a crime. He has also refused to take part in the manual work that all prisoners in his unit are supposed to do: packing disposable chopsticks and similar chores.

 

A family friend told me that Jianguo might be able to leave China on medical parole, and I asked him many times if he would consider it. He wouldn’t. “I will not leave China unless my freedom of return is guaranteed,” he insisted. I have stopped asking. Jianguo repeatedly mentions the predicament of exiled Chinese dissidents in the West, who, in the post-Tiananmen era, have lost their political effectiveness. “Once they leave Chinese soil, their role is very limited,” Jianguo says. But how politically effective is it to sit in a tiny cell for nine years—especially when most of your countrymen don’t even know of your existence?

 

That’s something I’ve never had the heart to bring up. The mainland Chinese press didn’t report the 1999 C.D.P. roundup, so few people in China ever knew what had happened. Outside China, there was some media coverage at the time, and some protests from human-rights groups, but the incident was soon eclipsed by the Falun Gong story. After almost eight years of incarceration, Jianguo is unrepentant, resolute, and forgotten.

 

Jianguo is the older of two sons my father had from his first marriage. He was seven when my father divorced his mother and married mine. Although my father had custody of Jianguo, the eight years that separated us meant that my childhood memories of him are mostly dim. As was the fashion at the time, he went to a boarding school and came home only on Sundays. He remained a gangly, reticent figure hovering at the edge of our family life.

 

Divorce was uncommon in China at the time, and no doubt it cast a shadow on Jianguo’s childhood. My mother recalls that, when Jianguo slept in the house, she sometimes heard him sobbing under his quilt. In letters written from prison, he described those weekends as “visiting someone else’s home” and said that he “felt like a Lin Daiyu”—referring to the tragic heroine in the Chinese classic “The Dream of the Red Chamber,” who, orphaned at a young age, has to live in her uncle’s house and compete with her cousins for love and attention. But his mother, whom I call Aunt Zhong, says that Jianguo was ambitious from a very young age. When she first told him the story of Yue Fei, a legendary general of the Song dynasty who was betrayed and died tragically, Jianguo looked up at her with tears in his eyes, and said, “But I’m still too young to be a Yue Fei!” She was startled. “I didn’t expect him to become a Yue Fei!” she told me.

 

She probably expected him to become a scholar. After all, the boy was surrounded not by military men but by academics and artists. My father was a philosopher. Aunt Zhong is an opera scholar and librettist from a distinguished intellectual family; her father was a university vice-president, her mother a painter who studied with the famous master Qi Baishi. In another letter from prison, Jianguo described those primary-school years as “uneventful,” aside from a vivid memory he has of a great summer storm that struck while he walked back to school one Sunday afternoon. In heated language, he recalled how he fought the wind and the downpour all the way, how he was drenched, alone in the deserted streets, but, oh, the awesome beauty of the thunder and lightning and the ecstasy he felt when he finally reached the school gate, the feeling he had of having beaten the monstrous storm all by himself!

 

Jianguo was also a voracious reader and a brilliant Go player. At the age of fourteen, he was accepted to an élite boarding middle school in Beijing, receiving the top score in his class in the entrance exam. Yet he felt restless. School life was confining, and he disliked the petty authorities he had to contend with. During this period, he began to worship Mao Zedong. He read Mao’s biography closely and tried to imitate his example: taking cold showers in winter, reading philosophy, and pondering the big questions of politics and society, which he debated with a group of friends. His first political act was to write a letter to the school administration attacking the rigidity of the curriculum and certain “bourgeois sentiments” it enshrined. This was something that Jianguo is still proud of: even before the Cultural Revolution, he had challenged the system, alone.

 

My own sheltered childhood ended with the Cultural Revolution. My parents were denounced as “stinking intellectuals” and “counter-revolutionaries.” Our house was ransacked. Under the new policy, I went to a nearby school of workers’ children, some of whom threw rocks at me and even left human excrement on our balcony. But Jianguo thrived amid the social turmoil, and became a leader of a Red Guard faction at his school. He seldom came home. When he did, he dressed in full Red Guard fashion: the faded green Army jacket and cap, the Mao button on the shirt pocket, the bright-red armband. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and, with his manly good looks, he seemed to me larger than life. I was shy and tongue-tied in his presence.

 

Two years later, in 1968, Jianguo left for Inner Mongolia with a group of other Red Guards. He was answering Chairman Mao’s call for the educated city youth to transform China’s poor countryside. My parents held a going-away party for him: I remember the din of a houseful of Red Guards talking, laughing, and eating, my mother boiling pot after pot of noodles, my father sitting silently in his study watching the teen-agers as though in someone else’s house, and Jianguo, seventeen years old, holding court like a young commander on the eve of battle. He invited his friends to take whatever they liked from my father’s library; many books were “borrowed,” including my mother’s favorite novel, “Madame Bovary,” never to be returned.

 

Aunt Zhong went to the railway station to see him off. When the train started leaving, she waved at her son. “But he acted as if I wasn’t there,” she told me. “He just kept yelling ‘Goodbye, Chairman Mao!’ The Cultural Revolution really poisoned his mind.”

 

Millions of urban youngsters went to the countryside in those days, but not all of them were true believers: some felt pressure to show proper “revolutionary enthusiasm,” while others went because there were no jobs in the cities. Most of them, shocked by the poverty and backwardness of rural life, became disillusioned. And as the fever of the Cultural Revolution waned, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, many returned home, getting factory jobs or going to university, which in those days depended not on your exam results but on your connections and political record.

 

Jianguo wasn’t among them. During the seven years he spent on a farm in Inner Mongolia, he had served as the village head and was popular among peasants. He was a good farmhand. He could drink as much baijiu, the hard northern liquor, as the locals could. He had married a former Beijing schoolmate and Red Guard, who stayed on because of him, and they were making a life for themselves in the countryside. The villagers ignored whatever “revolutionary initiatives” Jianguo tried to introduce, but his personality—honest, warm, generous—won him their affection.

 

In 1976, Mao died, the Cultural Revolution ended, and Jianguo’s daughter was born. Jianguo named her Jihong (“Inheriting Red”). The next few years were critical in China: Deng Xiaoping began to steer the country toward reform and greater openness. The university entrance exam, which had been suspended for more than a decade, was reinstated; I was among those who took the exam and went to university, a welcome change from the farmwork to which I’d been consigned. But Jianguo seemed stuck in the earlier era. He framed a large portrait of Mao with black gauze and hung it on a wall of his home; he would sit in front of it for hours, lost in thought. His wife later told me that Jianguo spent two years grieving for Mao.

 

Jianguo eventually took a job with the county government of his rural outpost, working for the local party secretary, a Mongolian named Batu, who took a shine to the bright young Beijinger. Then Jianguo criticized one of Batu’s policy directives, which he saw as disastrous for the peasants, and even took Batu to task in front of a crowded cadre assembly. Jianguo lost his post and was placed under investigation. Condemned as a “running dog of the Gang of Four,” he was locked up in solitary confinement, allowed to read only books by Marx, Lenin, and Mao. Two years later, Batu left the county for a higher position, and Jianguo was released. He was given various low-level posts, and was never promoted.

 

In 1985, when I was a graduate student in comparative literature at Columbia University, I went to visit him. After an eighteen-hour ride on a hard-seated train from Beijing, I arrived at a dusty little county station. The man waiting for me there looked like all the other local peasants hawking melons and potatoes from the back of their oxcarts. He was dressed like a peasant, spoke with a local accent, and had even developed a habit of squatting. His torpid movements suggested years of living in a remote backwater where nothing much ever happened.

 

It was early 1989 when Jianguo’s wife finally prevailed on him to move back to Beijing. She was a practical woman, and she wasn’t reconciled to a life of rural squalor. She was the one who, driven by poverty, sewed Jianguo’s last piece of Red Guard memorabilia, a faded red flag bearing the guards’ logo, into a quilt cover. Now she was determined not to let their daughter grow up a peasant. For Jianguo, however, their return marked a humiliating end of a twenty-year mission. The idea of bringing revolution to the countryside had turned out to be a fantasy. He changed nothing there. It changed him.

 

Four months after Jianguo’s return to Beijing, students started marching on Tiananmen Square. Going to the square each day, listening to the speeches and the songs, watching a new generation of student rebels in action—for Jianguo, it was a profoundly moving experience. Twenty years earlier, the Red Guards’ god was Mao. Now the idealistic kids in blue jeans and T-shirts had erected a new statue: the Goddess of Democracy.

 

I was living in Beijing at the time and visited the square daily. Jianguo said little when we met, though he was evidently in turmoil. One afternoon, I asked him to join me while I visited a friend who was active in the protests. Outside on the square, my friend greeted me warmly and invited me to come inside the tent where a group of student leaders were meeting, but when Jianguo followed me he frowned and barred him: “No, not you!” I explained that the man was my brother. My friend looked incredulous. Here, in his native city, Jianguo stood out as a country bumpkin. And, in 1989, the democracy activists were members of an urban élite. My friend’s snobbery must have driven home the message to Jianguo: Stand aside. This is not your revolution.

 

Soon, it was nobody’s revolution. What happened to the Tiananmen protesters on June 4th showed what awaited those who openly challenged the system. After the massacre, all government ministers were required to demonstrate loyalty to the Party by visiting the few hospitalized soldiers—“heroes in suppressing the counter-revolutionary riot.” The novelist Wang Meng, who was then the Minister of Culture, got out of it by claiming ill health and checking into a hospital himself. He was promptly removed from office.

 

During the spring demonstrations, reporters for the People’s Daily had held up a famous banner on the street: “We don’t want to lie anymore!” It was a rare moment of collective courage. Two months later, they were forced to lie again. A journalist at the newspaper described to me how the campaign to purge dissent was conducted there: meetings were held at every section, and everybody had to attend. Each employee was required to give a day-by-day account of his activities during the Tiananmen period, and then to express his attitude toward the official verdict. “Every one of us did this—no one dared to say no,” he said, recalling the scene seventeen years later. “Can you imagine how humiliating it was? We were crushed, instantly and completely.”

 

Among journalists and intellectuals, a brief interval of exhilaration had given way to depression and fear. Many withdrew from public life and turned to private pursuits. (A few, like me, moved to the United States or Europe.) Scholars embarked on esoteric research—hence the Guoxue Re, the early-nineties craze for studying the Chinese classics. A friend of mine, the editor of a magazine that had been an influential forum for critical reporting, turned his attention to cuisine and classical music. Meanwhile, Jianguo, whose residual faith in the Communist Party and in Mao had perished on June 4th, was adrift, both politically and personally.

 

The driver of the gypsy cab was a stocky man with a rugged, weather-beaten face, and wore a cheap, oily-looking blazer. He was leaning on a Jetta, smoking a cigarette, when I got out of the prison snack shop. On this particular afternoon, three years ago, I was the last visitor to leave. As soon as he saw me, he took one hard draw on the cigarette and flicked it away.

 

“Good thing you’re still here,” I said as I got into the car, “or I’d have had a long walk to the bus stop.”

 

“I was waiting for you,” he said simply, and started the engine.

 

I told him my city address. “Thirty yuan,” he said. I agreed, and we were on our way. At the end of the long asphalt road, the car turned right, onto a wider street, passing enormous mounds of construction material. In the distance, a line of silos was silhouetted against the horizon. Though we were just a forty-minute drive from the city, everywhere you looked there were old factories, low piles of rubble, industrial-waste dumps, half-deserted farm villages on the brink of being bulldozed and “developed.” The farm I’d been sent to work on when I was in my late teens was just a few miles away.

 

I was in my usual post-visit mood: tired and unsociable. I closed my eyes, and drowsed until a sharp horn woke me. When I opened my eyes, there were cars everywhere: we had got off the expressway and had entered the maw of downtown traffic. We were hardly moving. It was about four o’clock, the beginning of rush hour.

 

“You were visiting your brother, weren’t you?” the driver asked.

 

My eyes met the driver’s in the rearview mirror. “How did you know?”

 

“Oh, we know the Second Prison folks pretty well. My father used to work there. Your brother is a Democracy Party guy, right?”

 

“You know about them?”

 

“Oh, yes, they want a multiparty system. How many years did he get?”

 

“Nine. He’s halfway through.”

 

“Getting any sentence reduction?”

 

“Nope, because he doesn’t admit to any crime.”

 

The driver spat out the window. “What they did is no crime! But it’s useless to sit in a prison. Is he in touch with Wuer Kaixi?”

 

This gave me a start. Wuer Kaixi was a charismatic student leader of Tiananmen Square, who, after years of exile in the United States, now lives in Taiwan. “No! How could he be?”

 

“But you know some foreigners, don’t you? You should tell your brother to get out, and get together with the folks in America and Taiwan. Most important thing is: get some guns! How can you beat the Communist Party? Only by armed struggle!”

 

“That’s an interesting idea,” I said, taken aback and trying to hide it. “But then China would be in a war. It would make for bloody chaos.”

 

“That would be great!” the driver said.

 

I was appalled. “If that happened, don’t you worry that the biggest victims would be ordinary people?”

 

“The ordinary people are the biggest victims already!” the driver replied, his face mottled with fury. “You look at this city—at what kind of life the officials and the rich people have, and what kind of shitty life we have.”

 

During the next ten minutes, while navigating traffic on Chang’an Avenue, the driver told me about himself. He had worked in the same state plant for more than twenty years, first as a machine operator, later as a truck driver. Then, a few years ago, the plant went bankrupt and shut down. All the workers were let go with only meagre severance pay.

 

“But they must give you partial medical insurance,” I said. I was thinking about three high-school friends with whom I’ve stayed in touch over the years: all three women were state factory workers now in their forties, all were laid off, but all have since found new jobs, and are making more money than before. Two of them even own their homes.

 

“The insurance is a piece of shit!” the driver replied. “It doesn’t cover anything. I’m scared of getting sick. If I’m sick, I’m done for. For twenty years we worked for them, and this is how they got rid of us!” He spat again. “You look at this city, all these fancy buildings and restaurants. All for the rich people! People like us can’t afford anything!”

 

On both sides of Chang’an Avenue, new skyscrapers and giant billboards stood under a murky sky. When it comes to architecture and design, most of this new Beijing looks like some provincial official’s dream of modernization. It’s clear that there is a lot of money in Beijing and a great many people are living better than before. But the gap between the rich and the poor has widened. I wondered whether Jianguo, or someone like him, could be the kind of leader that people like this aggrieved cabdriver were waiting for. Under the banner of social justice, they could vent their rage against China’s new order.

 

Despite the emotions that the Tiananmen massacre had awakened in Jianguo, he had a more pressing matter to deal with that year: he had to make a living. Legally, Jianguo and his wife were “black” persons: they had no residential papers, no apartment, no job. Worse still, they had no marketable skills. So for a period they stayed with relatives and took temporary jobs at an adult-education school that Jianguo’s younger brother, Jianyi, had started. Jianguo worked as a janitor, his wife as a bookkeeper. The school was a success, mainly because it offered prep courses for the Test of English as a Foreign Language. During the chill that followed Tiananmen, studying English was becoming ever more popular, and TOEFL was crucial for applying to foreign schools. Jianyi was growing rich, fast. It was an awkward reversal of roles. The two brothers had very different personalities: next to his serious, ambitious, and hardworking big brother, Jianyi was always viewed as a baby-faced “hooligan”: he goofed off at school, chased girls, and squandered his money on dining out and having a good time. But in the new China the free-spending playboy was thriving. At first, he’d wanted Jianguo to help him manage the business, but Jianguo declined; he preferred to have more time to read and think, and being a janitor allowed for that. “He is always interested in saving China, but he can’t even save himself!” Jianyi once said to me about Jianguo. I wondered how Jianguo felt about pushing a mop around for his little brother.

 

Jianguo didn’t stay on the job long. In the following decade, he moved frequently, from apartment to apartment, and from job to job, mainly low-level office work. But he seemed to have decided that he’d spent enough time reading and thinking; he was eager to try something bigger. After 1992, when the society was seized by an entrepreneurial fever, Jianguo tried a number of ventures. He got involved in a scheme to buy coal in the north and sell it in the south. He set up a factory producing a new licorice soda. (It tasted like cough syrup.) He ran business-training programs. But he always ended up either quitting the job or closing the shop. By the summer of 1997, the last time I saw him before he was arrested, he had filed for bankruptcy several times. His personal life was in disarray as well. He had divorced his wife of nearly twenty years and married a young, pretty girl from Inner Mongolia who worked in the soda factory. This second marriage lasted less than a year, collapsing as soon as the business did, and Jianguo ended up moving in with his daughter.

 

By then, Jihong (“Inheriting Red”) had been renamed Huiyi (“Wisdom and Pleasure”). The girl attended a community college, and spent her time reading pulp romances and chatting with her girlfriends. But she was devoted to her father. When she graduated, in 1998, she got a job as a front-desk receptionist at the upscale Jinglun Hotel, and turned over half her salary to him. It was clear to both of them, by now, that he wasn’t cut out for business. Then, in 1998, Jianyi died, of a brain tumor, and Jianguo inherited his Beijing apartment. Finally, Jianguo had a place that he could call his own. With a home, and the help of his daughter, he was free to do what he wanted.

 

That August, I received a long, wistful letter from Jianguo. Jianyi’s death, at the age of forty-four, was obviously a shock. “He’s gone, and the sense of life’s bitter shortness presses on me more urgently,” Jianguo wrote. “Yesterday was my forty-seventh birthday. Will my remaining twenty or thirty years also slip away in the blink of an eye?” Now he looked back on his existence:

 

 

 

My whole life I have had a strong mind but my fate has not been good. Over the past few decades I have been fighting this fate, clenching my teeth and not crying. I am an idealist. For the ideal of democracy, I quit the Party; for the ideal of freedom, I quit my job, over and again; for the ideal of love, I divorced, over and again. To this day I am, intellectually, professionally, financially and emotionally, a “vagabond.” . . . The Chinese market is now in a slump, and the majority of businesses are not doing well. China, too, is floating in wind and storm, not knowing where it is heading. When will there be an opportunity for people like me to rise up with the flagpole of rebellion?

 

 

 

Jianguo hadn’t changed, I remember thinking with a vague sense of foreboding. Within the striving, clueless businessman was a rebel waiting for a new cause.

 

What I did not know was that Jianguo had already found it. A couple of years earlier, he had met a man named Xu Wenli, a former railway electrician and a veteran dissident from the Democracy Wall period. That was a brief political thaw in the late nineteen-seventies, when, on a wall at a busy intersection in the heart of Beijing, people put up posters, essays, poems, and mimeographed articles, attracting huge crowds who read and discussed what had been posted. (In late 1979, the government cracked down, and cleaned it up.) When a friend introduced Jianguo to Xu Wenli, he had just emerged from a dozen years in prison. The two men had passionate discussions about Chinese politics, but at first they also planned to go into business together. One idea was to start a car-rental company. They did some market surveys, and decided on their own business titles: Xu would be the chairman of the board, Jianguo the vice-chairman. In the end, the venture didn’t work out; a loan that Xu was counting on never materialized.

 

In early 1998, the atmosphere in China was unusually relaxed—the government was negotiating for membership in the World Trade Organization; President Clinton was coming to visit—and small groups of dissidents in different cities decided to take advantage of the new mood, moving to form an opposition party. They settled on the name China Democracy Party. Xu assumed the title of the chairman of the C.D.P.’s Beijing branch, Jianguo that of the vice-chairman, the two reclaiming their business titles for a loftier cause. With peculiar daring, or na?veté, the officers of the C.D.P. decided to do everything openly: they tried to register the party at the civil-affairs bureau, they posted statements and articles on the Internet, they talked to foreign reporters. For a few months, the government allowed these activities, but, shortly after Clinton’s visit, in June, a crackdown began, and a first wave of arrests and trials took place. Xu Wenli, among others, received a thirteen-year sentence. Jianguo remained free but was followed by four security agents every day. He assumed the title of the party’s executive chairman and carried on: he called meetings and urged the few C.D.P. members who came to stand firm; he posted new statements on the Internet, expressing his political views and demanding the release of Xu Wenli and his other jailed comrades. When the police finally arrested Jianguo, in June of 1999, he had long been ready for them. He had even taken to carrying around a toothbrush.

 

“Heroic deeds are not appropriate to everyday life,” the Czech dissident Ludvík Vaculík wrote, in the nineteen-seventies. “Heroism is acceptable in exceptional situations, but these must not last too long.” Those words were born out by the tenor of post-Tiananmen Beijing. Over time, a semblance of normalcy returned. Throughout the nineteen-nineties, while new market reforms were launched and people’s energies were directed toward the pursuit of wealth, the Party established clear guidelines about which topics could be publicly discussed and which topics could not (such as the infamous “three Ts”: Tiananmen, Taiwan, and Tibet). As the economy boomed, the ranks of the educated élite splintered: some plunged into commerce, some—notably the economists and the applied scientists—built careers selling their expertise to the government and to corporations. Artists and scholars scrambled to adapt to the marketplace.

 

Gradually, a tacit consensus emerged, which was captured in the title of a book published in the late nineteen-nineties: “Gaobie Geming” (“Farewell, Revolution”). The book was written by two of the star intellectuals of the previous decade, Li Zehou, a philosopher and historian, and Liu Zaifu, a literary critic. Both men had been hugely influential figures during the movements that led up to Tiananmen. Both became involved with the Tiananmen demonstrations, and ended up living in the United States in the nineties. Yet their book was a scathing critique of the radicals and the revolutionaries. Looking back upon the past century of Chinese history, Li and Liu observed that attempts to bring about radical change had always resulted either in disaster or in tyranny. China was too big, its problems too numerous and complex, for any quick fix. Incremental reform, not revolution, was the right approach. In a separate article, Li also laid out four successive phases of development—economic progress, personal freedom, social justice, political democracy—that stood between China and full modernity. In other words, achieving real democracy wasn’t a matter of throwing a switch.

 

These were the arguments of two smart, reasonable Chinese with liberal-democratic sympathies. And they struck a chord with other smart, reasonable Chinese who were equally sympathetic toward liberalism but increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of radical change. Though the book was published in Hong Kong, it gave voice to a subtle reconfiguration in the attitude of mainland élites during the nineties.

 

The new consensus was shaped by a curious combination of trends. Outside China, the exiled pro-democracy movement had foundered, beset by factionalism. Inside China, the tone for public life was Deng Xiaoping’s mantra “No debate”—that is, forget ideological deliberation and focus on economic development. While the technocrats moved to the politburo and pushed market reforms, the ideologues stayed in the propaganda ministry and tried to muffle voices of criticism. Meanwhile, the economy kept growing, at breakneck speed. As China integrated into the international marketplace, four hundred million Chinese were lifted out of poverty. A new affluent class began to emerge in the cities and coastal areas, where the younger generation, reared on the pop culture of consumerism, shied away from politics. As beneficiaries of the boom, they were generally “pro-China”; nationalist sentiments were growing. But “pro-democracy”? It’s unclear whether these young people cared enough to give it much thought.

 

So when Jianguo and his comrades formed the China Democracy Party, in 1998, they not only failed to grasp the limits of the government’s tolerance; they failed to take the measure of the national mood. For the most part, they lacked deep roots in any particular community; they weren’t well educated or connected to the country’s élites; and they had little contact with other liberals and reformers. A few, like Xu Wenli, were marginalized because of their former prison records and their continued refusal to recant or compromise. They had the courage of their convictions, and not much else. Some, like Jianguo, had tried to do something “constructive,” and join the entrepreneurial ferment, but got nowhere. They had, in short, lost their way in the new era.

 

When I first started visiting Jianguo in jail, I could tell, despite his disavowals, how much he cared about the outside world’s response to what he’d done, and to what had been done to him. So I tried to tell him every piece of “positive news” I could find. His eyes would light up, or he’d assume a look of solemn resolve. My task got harder as the C.D.P. faded from the news. In late 2002, Xu Wenli, the star dissident, was released on medical parole and was flown to the United States on Christmas Eve. Afterward, coverage of the other jailed C.D.P. members largely ceased.

 

Once, I had a sobering conversation with a woman while waiting for the prison interview. She was visiting her younger brother, who had killed another man in a quarrel and had been sentenced to twenty years. “He was in the restaurant business and the guy owed him money,” she explained. “He was young, too rash.” She asked me what my brother had done. When I told her, she was flabbergasted. “Organizing a party?” she said, and blinked as though I were speaking in tongues. “I didn’t know our country still had political prisoners. I thought everyone here got in trouble because of something to do with money.”

 

The last time I saw the C.D.P. mentioned in a major publication was in March, 2002, in a profile in the New York Times Magazine. The subject of the article was my friend John Kamm, a former American businessman who became a full-time campaigner for Chinese prisoners of conscience. The article dismissed the C.D.P. as “a toothless group of a few hundred members writing essays mainly for one another.” The line made me wince. The C.D.P. men could take pride in their status as “subverters” of a totalitarian state. And they could forgive their countrymen for not rising up with them: they are heroic precisely because most other people are not. But how could they face this verdict—of laughable irrelevance—from the Times, a symbol of the freedom and democracy for which they’d sacrificed everything? Toothless men writing for one another: the words were heartless. They were also true. And perhaps it didn’t much matter that these men were toothless because their powerful opponent had rendered them so; that they were writing only for each other because in China a message like theirs was not allowed to spread further. I felt like weeping. But I wasn’t sure whether it was because I was sorry for Jianguo or angry at him—for being such a fool. While he sits in his tiny cell, day after day, year after year, the world has moved on.

 

“You can’t say the world has forgotten about him,” John Kamm insisted, when we spoke not long ago. “I haven’t! I care about what happens to your brother!” We were drinking coffee in the lobby café of a Beijing hotel where John was staying during one of his trips to China.

 

John is, by his own description, “a human-rights salesman.” Formerly the chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, he had a lucrative business career, with a chauffeured Mercedes, maids, and a condo in a prime location. Then, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, he gave all that up to become an advocate for political prisoners in China. Shuttling frequently between Beijing and Washington, D.C., and meeting with high-ranking officials on both sides, John uses everything in his power—hard data, personal connections, cajoling, name-dropping, bargaining—to make sure that the issue of Chinese political prisoners doesn’t go away.

 

He’s a big man with a sonorous voice, earthy humor, and gregarious charm. He’s also a devout Catholic with a missionary fervor, and his conversation glistens with Biblical cadences. (“Justice will flow down like a river and righteousness a mighty stream.”) He has been my main adviser on all questions concerning Jianguo and my prison visits, and if Jianguo has been treated better than some political detainees it’s probably because of John’s efforts. But he acknowledges that Jianguo’s name has fallen off the annual list of political prisoners compiled by various Western governments and watchdog groups. I once asked John what he would do if he were in Jianguo’s position. John thought for a moment and told me a story about what had happened in the late nineteen-forties when Bertolt Brecht, then living in the United States, was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He agreed to testify, assured the committee that he had no sympathy for Communism, and was thanked for co?perating. Then he flew to Europe, and ended up in East Berlin, where he doesn’t seem to have given a second thought to anything he might have professed on the stand. “If I was arrested, I’d do exactly what Brecht did,” John told me. “I’d lie to save my ass. Then I’d have a life!”

 

I sighed. I consider John, who abandoned his career to devote himself to the plight of strangers in someone else’s country, to be an American hero. So, if even a man like him would do what was necessary to stay out of jail, why must my brother be so stubborn? Doesn’t it make more sense to chip at a wall, little by little, than to bash your head against it?

 

The harshest comments I have heard about Jianguo come from his own mother. “It’s not bravery,” she once told me. “It’s arrogance and stupidity. He’s had a hero complex from childhood. The problem is, he’s not a hero. He is a foot soldier who wants to be a general, but without the talent and the skills of a general.”

 

Aunt Zhong was a beautiful woman when she was young. Purged as a “rightist” in 1957, she lost her job and labored in a camp for years. She is now a little white-haired woman in her seventies, with a kind smile and swollen, aching legs. She has no illusions about the Communist Party, but thinks that change can occur only slowly. In her view, the C.D.P. was “banging an egg against a rock.” She had tried to talk Jianguo out of his involvement in the C.D.P., by reminding him of his responsibilities to his own family. Jianguo had replied with a classical saying: “Zhong xiao bu neng liang quan”—“One must choose between loyalty and filial devotion.” Upset by Jianguo’s obstinacy, she did not visit him for two years after his arrest.

 

Her exasperation is reciprocated. Aunt Zhong and I once went to visit Jianguo together. During the interview, we took turns speaking with him by phone. At one point, Aunt Zhong started talking about how China was too big a country to change quickly, how the situation was gradually improving and many things were getting better. I watched Jianguo’s face darken steadily, until he said something and Aunt Zhong handed the phone to me. As soon as I got on, Jianguo said in a voice shaking with emotion, “I don’t want to listen to her! She only makes me angry!”

 

After the visit, I told Aunt Zhong about a conversation I’d had with Han Dongfang, a workers’-union activist who had been jailed after Tiananmen. When we met, Han had been living in Hong Kong for many years, hosting a radio call-in show on Chinese labor problems. His credentials as a dissident were impeccable: during his two years in jail, he was tortured, got violently sick, and nearly died. Refusing to yield, he staged a hunger strike. Unlike many Chinese dissidents, though, Han is decidedly urbane (stylish clothes, fluent English, polite manners) and reflective about his past and his personal weaknesses. He was critical of Chinese dissidents on the whole, including himself. “Please don’t get me started on that topic,” Han told me. “I don’t have anything nice to say about the lot.” He believed that many Chinese dissidents were afflicted with an inflated self-regard. “It’s a sickness so many of us are not aware of,” he said. But, Han said, one should not discuss these things with a dissident in prison. “Because to get through prison you need to mobilize all your strength, to be self-righteous and believe that you are a hero,” he said. “You need that kind of mental arrogance to prop up your spirit. You cannot afford self-doubt.”

 

Aunt Zhong listened to what Han had told me, and accepted the point. She promised not to discuss politics again with Jianguo. “I just hope he will get through his term and come out in good health,” she said, shaking her head. “After that, maybe we can all have a good talk with him. I hope he will change his way of thinking and not get back in jail again.”

 

The political landscape in China has grown more complex since the days of the C.D.P. crackdown. After years of rapid growth, China is now the fourth-largest economy in the world, poised to surpass Germany and Japan before long, and widely expected to catch up with the United States around 2050. It has the highest foreign-currency reserve in the world. The transformation, however, has been accompanied by endemic corruption, environmental destruction, a widening income gap, and unravelling social services. The policies of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have tempered some of these problems, by eliminating the agricultural tax, paying more attention to the “weaker communities,” and taking measures to curb graft. But there’s a growing sense that deeper accommodations must be made: on the one side is a swelling mass of disadvantaged people who bear the brunt of social inequity and want more reform and fairness; on the other is a large body of mid-level bureaucrats who are in a mercenary alliance with business interests and resist any structural change. Everyone knows that, in the political realm, something will eventually have to give.

 

Agitation for political reform has, in the past four or five years, grown more assertive, while taking on more varied and artful forms: instead of using the fraught term ren quan (“human rights”), for example, people talk about fa zhi (“the rule of law”) and wei quan (“defending civil rights”) to discuss consumer rights or migrant-labor rights or private-property rights. Each year, there are more cases in which journalists expose corruption, lawyers take up civil-rights suits in court, scholars investigate the “blank spots” of history (the Sino-Japanese War, the great famine of 1959-62, the Cultural Revolution), publishers defy taboos and print “sensitive” books. From time to time, a statement or a petition is signed by a group of people, though they usually take pains to present themselves as an assortment of individuals, rather than as an organization. Acts of this nature tend to be sporadic and spontaneous, although, with the rapid expansion of the Internet and international communication, news travels fast, and the task of controlling information becomes more daunting. On the Chinese Internet, the voices of criticism are so diverse that censors face the equivalent of a guerrilla war with a thousand fronts. For every offender who gets caught and punished, a hundred get away. These critics can’t be easily located, isolated, and destroyed, the way the C.D.P. was.

 

Meanwhile, globalization has made the government and the leaders more mindful of their own image. The official talk of “peaceful rising” and “building a harmonious society” in recent years reflects a softer approach in both international and domestic politics. On the whole, the political atmosphere in China really has eased, and people are a little less afraid. In private and in public, Chinese discussions of political reform are getting louder.

 

So Aunt Zhong had a point when she told Jianguo that the situation in China is improving. And not everyone has forgotten the C.D.P. incident. Several of my liberal Chinese friends have told me that, thanks to men like Jianguo, who tested “the baseline” with their lives, others now know exactly how far they can push. As one of them, Cui Weiping, put it, “The officials think of us as moderates because of them. They are the reason we are not in prison. For this alone we are grateful.” Cui, a literary and film critic, has translated Havel’s essays into Chinese. She writes publicly about the need to build civil society in order to battle totalitarian culture. She respects men like Jianguo but says that “real change will come from small, ignoble places. Social movements, not the élite or lone heroes, are going to make history.”

 

Another prominent liberal figure, Xu Youyu, a philosopher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a forceful advocate of political reform, told me that he would never make “foolish decisions” such as those made by the C.D.P. founders. “It was stupid in terms of political strategy,” he said. Xu, who is well-versed in Western analytical philosophy and liberal theory, emphasizes the importance of “rational analysis” before taking any action. “Perhaps they were eager to set a record—to be the first to openly form an opposition party in Communist China,” Xu said. “If that’s what motivated them, it’s the sort of human weakness I could forgive.” Like Jianguo, Xu had been a Red Guard, and he has written a candid and moving memoir about the Cultural Revolution, with soul-searching reflections on his own youthful delusions. He signed a copy for Jianguo and asked me to bring it to him. Not surprisingly, the censor at the prison book desk rejected it.

 

But Jianguo isn’t an educator, like Xu. He’s a man of action. The C.D.P. founders are all men of action, and history has not been kind to them. I remember something I heard a Chinese C.E.O. once say: “The person who takes one step ahead of others is a leader. The person who takes three steps ahead of others is a martyr.” The C.D.P. men are martyrs. I used to console myself with the old Chinese saying “Bu yi chengbai lun yingxiong”—“Do not judge a hero by victory or defeat.” Yet Jianguo also seems a mulish simpleton, a man with a black-and-white vision of politics, oblivious of all shades of gray, not to mention the rainbow of hues that you’d need to paint a semblance of Chinese life today. In other moods, I would think of Confucius’ remark about one of his disciples, Zilu: “He has daring, but little else.”

 

Neither attitude seems quite right to me now. I recall a conversation I had with Perry Link, a distinguished China scholar at Princeton, about Wei Jingsheng. Wei is Jianguo’s personal hero, a legendary figure in the Chinese democracy movement. Back in 1978, when he was a twenty-eight-year-old electrician, Wei had the audacity to post essays on the Democracy Wall demanding democratization; Deng Xiaoping, he said, was a dictator. Wei was charged, absurdly, with “leaking state secrets,” and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. During his time behind bars, through sickness and periods of solitary confinement, he never backed away from his views. Once he had been released, he immediately resumed his pro-democracy writing and activities, and was sent back to prison. After serving two years of a fourteen-year sentence, he was freed, ostensibly for “medical reasons,” and flown to the United States, where he kept up his personal campaign against the Chinese government. The West must not be fooled by its reforms, he warns, for the Communist Party will never change its true nature. What’s certain is that Wei will never change. Over time, many of his early admirers have come to see him as a man with a simplistic, static vision of China and the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, the Party appears to be far more agile and adaptive than Wei Jingsheng.

 

I told Perry about my ambivalence toward people like my brother and Wei. I admired their courage, their deep sense of justice, but felt uncomfortable with their almost religious sense of self-certainty. “People like Wei Jingsheng are like the North Pole,” he told me. “They are frozen, but they define a pole.”

 

Yes, I thought, my brother is frozen, with his unchanging, unchangeable vision of what is to be done. He reduces a vast, complicated tangle of problems to a single point source of evil: the Communist Party. End one-party rule, and the evil is eradicated. Even as he is locked up, he has locked the world out, refusing to listen to anything that disturbs his convictions, closing his eyes to a reality ridden with contradictions, ambiguities, and possibilities. For all this, Perry is right: people like Jianguo define a pole.

 

And, of course, those who locked him up are on the wrong side of history. Liu Ge, a friend who is a partner at an illustrious Beijing law firm, likes to remind me of this. “All the countries that have succeeded in modernization have a multiparty system, while those sticking to one-party rule are losers,” Liu said. “Democracy makes a country win and dictatorship makes a country lose. The rulers today want to make China better, and they have done a lot of things well, but they cannot face their ugly past, how they turned China into a place with a hundred holes and a thousand wounds, the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and so on. So they are not confident enough to take radical critics like your brother.”

 

Gradually, though, I have come to feel a certain degree of impatience with the impulse to see Jianguo mainly through the lens of Chinese politics. I’d rather see my brother not as an integer in the realm of political calculation but as a flawed but admirable human being, with perhaps one striking oddity—his uncompromising insistence on upholding his idealism at any cost. A novelist friend of mine who has listened to me talk about Jianguo over the years once compared him to the creatures she’d seen in the 2005 documentary “March of the Penguins.” “The penguins are silly, laughable creatures—they are fat, they waddle, they fall on their belly, and they are single-minded,” she said. “But when they are in the water they are beautiful! What your brother does politically is absurd, but his idealism and his courage in their purity are beautiful.”

 

Maybe the question of whether Jianguo is a hero or a fool is beside the point. Above and beyond the consequences of his action is the moral meaning of his action. By keeping his promise to himself, he has fulfilled his own vision of a righteous life, his own sense of purpose. During one of my prison visits, I mentioned that a former classmate of Jianguo’s, an expert on rural issues, had just won a prestigious official award. “That’s good,” Jianguo replied. “He helps the reform from within the system. I’m outside the system. There are a lot of big intellectuals who can help reform with their knowledge. I don’t have enough systematic education to do that. But people like us have a role to play, too.” He smiled at me. “Character is fate. Just remember this: your brother is a simple, old-fashioned, outdated, and stubborn man. Once I make up my mind, I stick to it.” In the past few years, he has lost much of his hair, and a recent attack of shingles had left some scabs on his forehead, but his face was as serene as I’d ever seen it.

 

With a year and a half to go, Jianguo has started talking about how many books he’d like to finish reading. “Really, it’s not bad here,” he assured me recently. “I’ll get out in 2008, and if you are in Beijing then we’ll watch the Olympics together.” We spoke about several of our Shanghai cousins, all successful businessmen and lawyers. “I’m very happy they do well in their business,” Jianguo said. “But each person has his own goal. To achieve democracy in a country, some people must offer their blood and lives in the struggle. Look at South Korea, or Taiwan: there had been so many crackdowns, so many prisoners. But, wave after wave, individuals rose up. They gave their lives to pave the way to their democracy.”

 

His eyes were intent, his gestures expansive; for a moment, you could tell, he had even forgotten that he was in prison. “China is a huge country,” he went on. “We have 1.3 billion people. We ought to have at least a few men who are willing to do this.” ?

 

 

 

【 在 xcvbnm (xx) 的大作中提到: 】
:
查建英：国家公敌
:

 

: : 英文原文发表在《纽约客杂志》，链接：http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/...0423fa_fact_zha
: ...................

 

--
MY NEW BLOG：

 

http://lzqcxd.blog.sohu.com

 

※ 来源:．一见如故 yjrg.net．[FROM: 60.20.0.0]

 

※ 修改:．洛之秋 于 Jul 20 10:23:25 修改本文．[FROM: 60.20.0.0]

 

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Flee

 

文章：3714
生命：814
经验：5192+1119
等级：35级 四季平安
[Blog]   [文集]发信人: Flee (蒸鱼赏菊谢，良辰莫逝), 信区: RGForum
标  题: Re: 查建英：国家公敌
发信站: 一见如故 (Sat Jul 21 23:03:00 2007), 本站(yjrg.net)

 

恩，很多事情我也没想得很清楚。

 

说说这篇文章，你注意没，中间某人的一句话其实有点刻毒。“也许他们急于创造纪录，想成为在共产党中国公开成立第一个反对党的人。如果这是他们的动机，这种人性弱点属于我可以理解和谅解的那一种。”

 

民主和自由在遥远的前方截断了未来，我们甚至“确信”它是历史的方向与可见的终极价值，是一切问题的灵丹妙药；便投身抑或是投机民主自由运动。这多少接近于（西方式）历史目的论的世界图景。

 

“时”、“势”包括“机”，是这种自信的历史进程的视野里缺少的元素；相对中国未来的理想，我个人更关注这个时代，＂时／势／机＂以及问题在现世中才具有充分的意义。

 

离开对过于→现在的认识（历史感）、离开对规律认识，可能很少有人能够对自己所处的时代抱有某些观点．但是，仅仅回溯与民主自由制度相关的事件，串连起它们并不是完整的西方历史；民主与自由的理论，也许使某些知识分子确信无疑，但我个人觉得，对于生命来说，能够确定无疑的规律是＂物竞天择，适者生存＂．所以，我们要承担的是这个现世；不要为了可能明天，责骂现世的丑陋；只有在现世的竞争中不失败，才能在明天继续存在．

 

苏格拉底说＂可朽之物追求不朽＂，究竟什么才能不朽呢？血脉／荣耀／家族／民族／文化？

 

大多数个体，都是在＂不朽的欲望＂中传承着，血脉也好、家族也好、文化也好，TA自出生那天起就活在强有力地传承着的纽带中，与生俱来的东西是无论如何也洗不掉的。比如“文化”，它使整全的“宇宙”成了我们脑中的“世界”，每一个字、每一个词、每一段文，都是先人所造之物，而我们的世界实际上是自然与字/文；字/文拓展了我们的世界，也限制了我们的世界，它是道路也是洞穴；离开字/文，人与兽无异（道路）；字/文-世界在不同文化中，又互不相同（洞穴）。我个人觉得难以超越文化，需要对自身所处的情境保有着自觉，对中国文化保持着谦卑。

 

宪政的民族国家？我们是在学着欧美。资本主义体系今天的和平，是因为大家都成了生意人，还是因为大国力量的平衡，资本主义真的能带来永世的和平吗？我们需要石油、需要安全，如果有人阻挡，有能力打又为什么不能一战？欧美就会不打吗？美国，有它的普世价值，我们可不可以也直接讲我们的普世价值，谁知道……

 

 

 

【 在 whisper 的大作中提到: 】
: 很多人经常觉得flee的观点有点不好懂，我也是没弄明白，flee君对中国的理想，到底是一个宪政化的民族国家，还是恢复帝国的本来面目。如果是后者，如何可能。我倒没有价值判断，只是觉得用一种思路理解不了你的观点，比如对日决战等。

 

: 【 在 Flee (蒸鱼赏菊谢，良辰莫逝) 的大作中提到: 】

 

: (以下引言省略...)

 

--

 

※ 修改:．Flee 于 Jul 21 23:42:13 修改本文．[FROM: 221.219.0.0]

 

全文链接: http://yjrg.net/HT/con_373_M.1185030180.A.htm
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